Frustrated Actresses Embark On Intriguing Search For Resolution

At times, Rosanna Arquette's documentary about the lives of movie actresses comes across as a deluxe whine-in.

Most of the hugs and happy talk ("You look wonderful!" "You are such a genius!") shouldn't have survived the editing process. And someone should have stopped the first-time producer-director from using the lead credit: "Experienced by Rosanna Arquette."

But it would be a shame if these missteps obscured what this 100-minute documentary has to offer: an articulate, impassioned argument by Vanessa Redgrave, Jane Fonda, Gwyneth Paltrow, Whoopi Goldberg, Salma Hayek, Holly Hunter, Charlotte Rampling, Meg Ryan, Sharon Stone, Frances McDormand, Arquette and other insiders against Hollywood's marginalization of women.

Mainstream film's indifference to female characters, especially those too old to be played by Angelina Jolie or Reese Witherspoon, is such old news by now that it's more likely to evoke yawns of boredom than howls of protest.

As Roger Ebert tells Arquette, the situation will change only when Hollywood stops taking its cues from male moviegoers younger than 25 -- and that, he implies, is not likely to happen very soon.

At a roundtable with a dozen of her peers, Julianna Margulies talks about coming off NBC's ER, where her character had a profession and a personality, to audition for movie parts as "the girlfriend."

And what does "the girlfriend" do in the movie?

"She's very supportive, and she loves her man," deadpans Samantha Mathis, as Daryl Hannah, Ally Sheedy and Kelly Lynch groan in sympathy.

And those are all performers in their 30s or early 40s. For women older than that -- outside the rarefied Oscar territory of the Redgraves, Streeps and Sarandons -- parts are even harder to come by.

"I can see it coming like a slow train," says 38-year-old Diane Lane, talking about the onset of middle age and the dwindling of roles.

Teri Garr, already there at 53, asks wryly why, if "there are people my age who still exist in the world," they don't buy tickets to see lives like theirs portrayed onscreen.

There's also a hilarious free-for-all about the moment an actress realizes that the men who are calling the shots at an audition don't consider her sexually attractive, though the phrase "sexually attractive" is replaced by a shorter, saltier adjective.

All this talk leads up to the moment when Arquette finally sits down with the object of her search.

Winger is the woman who had it all and decided it wasn't worth keeping.

A star at 25 thanks to Urban Cowboy, she had her pick of roles in the '80s but found working in movies less and less satisfying. After two more hits before she was 30, An Officer and a Gentleman and Terms of Endearment, she worked only sporadically -- by choice, she says.

In the first year or two out of the limelight, "I felt half-dead," Winger admits. But she has found other things that satisfy the creative urges that acting in movies once did, although she doesn't talk very much about what those creative alternatives have been.

In a way, that's almost beside the point. Because despite too many moments of self-indulgence, Searching for Debra Winger isn't really about Winger, or Arquette, or why Hollywood owes any of these women a living, let alone a permanent place in the limelight.

What's important in the larger scheme of things is not their individual roles but their collective one.

Hollywood isn't called the dream factory for nothing, and the question of just whose dreams get enacted up on the screen -- whether it's mostly those of 19-year-old males or something more inclusive and generous -- goes beyond the fate of a particular actress.